The civil and military authorities appear to be at odds over the slow pace of implementation on a new national plan introduced to effectively deal with the threat of terrorism and extremism. The National Action Plan (NAP) was unanimously adopted by the political leadership after Taliban terrorists methodically killed dozens of pupils and staff at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December last year.
On Tuesday, army chief General Raheel Sharif used a corps commanders’ meeting to call for taking ‘governance initiatives’ in order to complement efforts of the security forces in the fight against terrorism. According to the military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the corps commanders’ meeting – presided over by the army chief at the GHQ – extensively reviewed the internal security situation. In a blunt statement following the corps commanders’ conference held on Tuesday, the ISPR communicated the military’s unhappiness with the extent to which the civilian side of the state is allegedly lagging behind the military side in fighting terrorism and extremism. Clearly, it cannot be a welcome state of affairs when the military leadership is publicly assailing the civilian leadership of the country. What compounds that problem is that a day earlier the army chief himself participated in the NAP review meeting convened by the prime minister. Could the specific concerns the army leadership has about NAP’s implementation not have been communicated in private? There are elements of the NAP that have gone well for the civilians, mostly those that were the soft targets, but the harder targets, particularly tackling extremism in madrassas and truly circumscribing the activities of banned groups, trail behind. It is not enough to arrest no matter how many thousands of preachers for hate crimes, unless at the same time a counter-narrative is being plugged into the hole created by their arrest. If this does not happen, then nothing is achieved, and we are back to square one as soon as the offenders are released as they invariably are. There is another aspect to the problem: are the military’s claims of success in fighting terrorism and militancy really what they are made out to be? While no one would claim that the civilian side of the state is performing adequately, it is also the case that the civilian shortcomings are in full view of the public. Is that necessarily so in the case of the military? When it comes to military operations in Fata, for example, are the frequent claims of sustained progress in any way independently verifiable? While Operation Zarb-i-Azb has disrupted militant networks in North Waziristan and reclaimed territory that militant groups dominated for years, there was never any road map to success declared by the military in advance. That means there is no way of knowing if Zarb-i-Azb is going according to plan and original expectations. Furthermore, with the majority of the IDPs yet to be resettled, it is not known at what cost the military successes have come.
pk.shafaqna.com
